Beethoven’s music is often associated with freedom. Chua explores the nature of this relationship through an investigation of the philosophical context of Beethoven’s reception and hermeneutic ...
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Beethoven’s music is often associated with freedom. Chua explores the nature of this relationship through an investigation of the philosophical context of Beethoven’s reception and hermeneutic readings of key works. Freedom is arguably the core value of modernity since late eighteenth-century; Beethoven’s music engages with its aspirations and dilemmas, providing a sonic ‘lens’ that enables us to focus on the aesthetic, philosophical, and theological ramifications of its claims of progress and autonomy and the formation of the self and its values. Taking his bearings from Adorno’s fragmentary reflections on Beethoven, Chua charts a journey from the heroic freedom associated with the Eroica Symphony to a freedom of vulnerability that opens itself to ‘otherness’. Chua’s analysis of the music demonstrates how various forms of freedom are embodied in the way time and space are manipulated in Beethoven’s works, providing an experience of a concept that Kant had famously declared inaccessible to sense. Beethoven’s music, then, does not simply mirror freedom; it is a philosophical and poetic engagement with the idea that is as relevant today as it was in the aftermath of the French Revolution.Less

Beethoven & Freedom

Daniel K L Chua

Published in print: 2017-09-28

Beethoven’s music is often associated with freedom. Chua explores the nature of this relationship through an investigation of the philosophical context of Beethoven’s reception and hermeneutic readings of key works. Freedom is arguably the core value of modernity since late eighteenth-century; Beethoven’s music engages with its aspirations and dilemmas, providing a sonic ‘lens’ that enables us to focus on the aesthetic, philosophical, and theological ramifications of its claims of progress and autonomy and the formation of the self and its values. Taking his bearings from Adorno’s fragmentary reflections on Beethoven, Chua charts a journey from the heroic freedom associated with the Eroica Symphony to a freedom of vulnerability that opens itself to ‘otherness’. Chua’s analysis of the music demonstrates how various forms of freedom are embodied in the way time and space are manipulated in Beethoven’s works, providing an experience of a concept that Kant had famously declared inaccessible to sense. Beethoven’s music, then, does not simply mirror freedom; it is a philosophical and poetic engagement with the idea that is as relevant today as it was in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

For the Enlightenment mind, from Moses Mendelssohn's focus on the moment of surprise at the heart of the work of art to Herder's imagining of the seismic moment at which language was discovered, it ...
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For the Enlightenment mind, from Moses Mendelssohn's focus on the moment of surprise at the heart of the work of art to Herder's imagining of the seismic moment at which language was discovered, it is the flash of recognition that nails the essence of the work, the blink of an eye in which one's world changes. This book unmasks such prismatic moments in iconic music from the Enlightenment, from the “chromatic” moment—the single tone that disturbs the thrust of a diatonic musical discourse—and its deployment in seminal instrumental works by Emanuel Bach, Haydn, and Mozart; on to the poetic moment, taking the odes of Klopstock, in their finely wrought prosody, as a challenge to the problem of strophic song; and finally to the grand stage of opera, to the intense moment of recognition in Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride and the exquisitely introverted phrase that complicates Cherubino's daring moment of escape in Mozart's Figaro. Finally, the tears of the disconsolate Konstanze in Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail provoke a reflection on the tragic aspect of Mozart's operatic women. Throughout, other players from literature and the arts—Diderot, Goethe, Lessing among them—enrich the landscape of this bold journey through the Enlightenment imagination.Less

Cherubino's Leap : In Search of the Enlightenment Moment

Richard Kramer

Published in print: 2016-11-21

For the Enlightenment mind, from Moses Mendelssohn's focus on the moment of surprise at the heart of the work of art to Herder's imagining of the seismic moment at which language was discovered, it is the flash of recognition that nails the essence of the work, the blink of an eye in which one's world changes. This book unmasks such prismatic moments in iconic music from the Enlightenment, from the “chromatic” moment—the single tone that disturbs the thrust of a diatonic musical discourse—and its deployment in seminal instrumental works by Emanuel Bach, Haydn, and Mozart; on to the poetic moment, taking the odes of Klopstock, in their finely wrought prosody, as a challenge to the problem of strophic song; and finally to the grand stage of opera, to the intense moment of recognition in Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride and the exquisitely introverted phrase that complicates Cherubino's daring moment of escape in Mozart's Figaro. Finally, the tears of the disconsolate Konstanze in Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail provoke a reflection on the tragic aspect of Mozart's operatic women. Throughout, other players from literature and the arts—Diderot, Goethe, Lessing among them—enrich the landscape of this bold journey through the Enlightenment imagination.

This book weaves three inquiries into an argument about how individuals can preserve and improve civic life in democratic cultures. The term “civic life” refers here to the interaction of citizens ...
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This book weaves three inquiries into an argument about how individuals can preserve and improve civic life in democratic cultures. The term “civic life” refers here to the interaction of citizens rather than to practices of government. The primary inquiry explores what democracy requires of individuals, proceeding through two other inquiries: one into jazz music as a model for democratic interaction, and the other into Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical conception of art as experiential and potentially transformative. Jazz is often described as democratic. Kenneth Burke’s quite American rhetorical and aesthetic theory explains how that is so. For Burke, rhetoric prompts a sense of shared identity, a sense that follows from an experience that is like being taken through a story of a song. Among individuals who are jealous of their freedom, this way of change seems more appropriate, more fitting, than argument. Working with others to address immediate problems they share can align for a time individuals who are otherwise very different. That is what jazz does: it enables people who are different and even in conflict to combine in cooperation toward an end that matters to all of them just now. This is what civic life in democratic cultures demands. The chapters in this book cycle through these inquiries, elaborating and improvising on them on each pass.Less

Civic Jazz : American Music and Kenneth Burke on the Art of Getting Along

Gregory Clark

Published in print: 2015-03-02

This book weaves three inquiries into an argument about how individuals can preserve and improve civic life in democratic cultures. The term “civic life” refers here to the interaction of citizens rather than to practices of government. The primary inquiry explores what democracy requires of individuals, proceeding through two other inquiries: one into jazz music as a model for democratic interaction, and the other into Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical conception of art as experiential and potentially transformative. Jazz is often described as democratic. Kenneth Burke’s quite American rhetorical and aesthetic theory explains how that is so. For Burke, rhetoric prompts a sense of shared identity, a sense that follows from an experience that is like being taken through a story of a song. Among individuals who are jealous of their freedom, this way of change seems more appropriate, more fitting, than argument. Working with others to address immediate problems they share can align for a time individuals who are otherwise very different. That is what jazz does: it enables people who are different and even in conflict to combine in cooperation toward an end that matters to all of them just now. This is what civic life in democratic cultures demands. The chapters in this book cycle through these inquiries, elaborating and improvising on them on each pass.

This book charts one constellation of musical metaphors, analogies, and expressive modalities embedded within late ancient and medieval cosmological discourse: that of
a cosmos animated and ...
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This book charts one constellation of musical metaphors, analogies, and expressive modalities embedded within late ancient and medieval cosmological discourse: that of
a cosmos animated and choreographed according to a specifically musical aesthetic. It offers a new intellectual history of the role of harmony in medieval cosmology and affirms music theory’s foundational and often normative role within the articulation and development of medieval cosmological models. Offering a counternarrative to the dominant conception of a Weberian “disenchantment,” which regards the harmonious, numerically organized natural world as the hallmark of a premodern worldview that was eventually (for better or worse) discredited and abandoned, this book interrogates the musical, mathematical, philosophical, and discursive strategies employed by ancient and medieval cosmologists in their construction of a harmonious world grounded in material interactions and intermaterial relations. It traces these strategies across the familiar terrain of the Boethian tripartition of music into “instrumental,” “human,” and “cosmic,” and reveals the myriad ways in which this basic tripartition was reinterpreted by Boethius’s twelfth-century readers in the light of other received Platonic texts, especially Plato’s Timaeus. The picture that results from this counternarrative is one in which the recent resurgence of vibrational and relational ontologies resonate, tellingly and productively, with the forgotten history of their medieval antecedents, in the writings of Bernard and Thierry of Chartres, William of Conches, Peter Abelard, Bernard Silvestris, and Alain de Lille.Less

Composing the World : Harmony in the Medieval Platonic Cosmos

Andrew Hicks

Published in print: 2017-01-26

This book charts one constellation of musical metaphors, analogies, and expressive modalities embedded within late ancient and medieval cosmological discourse: that of
a cosmos animated and choreographed according to a specifically musical aesthetic. It offers a new intellectual history of the role of harmony in medieval cosmology and affirms music theory’s foundational and often normative role within the articulation and development of medieval cosmological models. Offering a counternarrative to the dominant conception of a Weberian “disenchantment,” which regards the harmonious, numerically organized natural world as the hallmark of a premodern worldview that was eventually (for better or worse) discredited and abandoned, this book interrogates the musical, mathematical, philosophical, and discursive strategies employed by ancient and medieval cosmologists in their construction of a harmonious world grounded in material interactions and intermaterial relations. It traces these strategies across the familiar terrain of the Boethian tripartition of music into “instrumental,” “human,” and “cosmic,” and reveals the myriad ways in which this basic tripartition was reinterpreted by Boethius’s twelfth-century readers in the light of other received Platonic texts, especially Plato’s Timaeus. The picture that results from this counternarrative is one in which the recent resurgence of vibrational and relational ontologies resonate, tellingly and productively, with the forgotten history of their medieval antecedents, in the writings of Bernard and Thierry of Chartres, William of Conches, Peter Abelard, Bernard Silvestris, and Alain de Lille.

This book studies the impact of disability and concepts of disability on composers, performers, and listeners with disabilities, as well as on discourse about music and works of music themselves. ...
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This book studies the impact of disability and concepts of disability on composers, performers, and listeners with disabilities, as well as on discourse about music and works of music themselves. Critical response to music by composers with disabilities has tracked changing conceptualizations of disability, as divine affliction, divine afflatus, medical pathology, and affirmative identity. The same is true for performers with disabilities: disability, like music, is something they learn to perform, and they do so in accordance with well established cultural scripts. Music itself may convey narratives about disability, including a familiar narrative of disability heroically and inspirationally overcome. The language that music theorists have traditionally used to describe music is pervaded by metaphors of disability and traditional music theory is essentially a normalizing enterprise. Finally, listeners with disabilities may find that their ways of listening are inflected by their nonnormative embodiment, resulting in various forms of disablist hearing.Less

Extraordinary Measures : Disability in Music

Joseph N. Straus

Published in print: 2011-03-21

This book studies the impact of disability and concepts of disability on composers, performers, and listeners with disabilities, as well as on discourse about music and works of music themselves. Critical response to music by composers with disabilities has tracked changing conceptualizations of disability, as divine affliction, divine afflatus, medical pathology, and affirmative identity. The same is true for performers with disabilities: disability, like music, is something they learn to perform, and they do so in accordance with well established cultural scripts. Music itself may convey narratives about disability, including a familiar narrative of disability heroically and inspirationally overcome. The language that music theorists have traditionally used to describe music is pervaded by metaphors of disability and traditional music theory is essentially a normalizing enterprise. Finally, listeners with disabilities may find that their ways of listening are inflected by their nonnormative embodiment, resulting in various forms of disablist hearing.

This book is about the changing audiovisual culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and its significance for the emergence of musical romanticism. The period from Haydn’s early ...
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This book is about the changing audiovisual culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and its significance for the emergence of musical romanticism. The period from Haydn’s early career to Beethoven’s maturity – roughly 1760 to 1810 – witnessed the cultural diffusion of visual technologies such as magnifying instruments, peepshows, shadow-plays and magic lanterns. From their initial homes in fairgrounds, laboratories and popular scientific literature, these devices moved into domestic spaces, public spectacles and the basic vocabulary of a wide range of discourses, including the language used to discuss music. This book trace the processes of dissemination and reception by which these devices facilitated changes in musical perception. Through relations that include analogy, substitution and accompaniment, the conjunctions of visual technologies and music helped cultivate new modes of listening. They also promoted notions of extending the senses and mastering invisible forces as alternative frameworks to mimesis and expression for making sense of music. By showing that musical romanticism embedded aspects of audiovisual culture, this book addresses one of the grand narratives of music history: that by aligning music purely with the ear and purging its material dimensions, romanticism spurred the development of a culture of serious music. Instead, this book shows how pivotal texts of musical romanticism evidence the entwinements of sight and sound, looking and listening, from which music gained status as the most metaphysical and otherworldly of the arts.Less

Deirdre Loughridge

Published in print: 2016-09-06

This book is about the changing audiovisual culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and its significance for the emergence of musical romanticism. The period from Haydn’s early career to Beethoven’s maturity – roughly 1760 to 1810 – witnessed the cultural diffusion of visual technologies such as magnifying instruments, peepshows, shadow-plays and magic lanterns. From their initial homes in fairgrounds, laboratories and popular scientific literature, these devices moved into domestic spaces, public spectacles and the basic vocabulary of a wide range of discourses, including the language used to discuss music. This book trace the processes of dissemination and reception by which these devices facilitated changes in musical perception. Through relations that include analogy, substitution and accompaniment, the conjunctions of visual technologies and music helped cultivate new modes of listening. They also promoted notions of extending the senses and mastering invisible forces as alternative frameworks to mimesis and expression for making sense of music. By showing that musical romanticism embedded aspects of audiovisual culture, this book addresses one of the grand narratives of music history: that by aligning music purely with the ear and purging its material dimensions, romanticism spurred the development of a culture of serious music. Instead, this book shows how pivotal texts of musical romanticism evidence the entwinements of sight and sound, looking and listening, from which music gained status as the most metaphysical and otherworldly of the arts.

From the Romantic era onwards music has been seen as the most quintessentially temporal art, possessing a unique capacity to invoke the human experience of time. Through its play of themes and ...
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From the Romantic era onwards music has been seen as the most quintessentially temporal art, possessing a unique capacity to invoke the human experience of time. Through its play of themes and recurrence of events music has the ability to stylise in multiple ways our temporal relation to the world, with far-reaching implications for modern conceptions of memory, subjectivity, personal and collective identity, and history. Time, as philosophers, scientists, and writers have found throughout history, is notoriously hard to define. Yet music, seemingly bound up so intimately with the nature of time, might well be understood as disclosing aspects of human temporality unavailable to other modes of inquiry, and accordingly was granted a privileged position in nineteenth-century thought. This book examines the multiple ways in which music may provide insight into the problematics of human time. Whether in the purported timelessness of Beethoven’s late works or the nostalgic impulses of Schubert’s music, in the use of music by philosophers as a means to explicate the aporias of temporal existence or as medium suggestive of the varying possible structures of time, as a reflection of a particular culture’s sense of historical progress or the expression of the intangible spirit behind the course of human history, each of the book’s chapters explores a specific theme in the philosophy of time as expressed through music. At once historical, analytical, critical, and ultimately hermeneutic, it provides fresh insight into many familiar nineteenth-century pieces and a rich theoretical basis for future research.Less

The Melody of Time : Music and Temporality in the Romantic Era

Benedict Taylor

Published in print: 2016-01-01

From the Romantic era onwards music has been seen as the most quintessentially temporal art, possessing a unique capacity to invoke the human experience of time. Through its play of themes and recurrence of events music has the ability to stylise in multiple ways our temporal relation to the world, with far-reaching implications for modern conceptions of memory, subjectivity, personal and collective identity, and history. Time, as philosophers, scientists, and writers have found throughout history, is notoriously hard to define. Yet music, seemingly bound up so intimately with the nature of time, might well be understood as disclosing aspects of human temporality unavailable to other modes of inquiry, and accordingly was granted a privileged position in nineteenth-century thought. This book examines the multiple ways in which music may provide insight into the problematics of human time. Whether in the purported timelessness of Beethoven’s late works or the nostalgic impulses of Schubert’s music, in the use of music by philosophers as a means to explicate the aporias of temporal existence or as medium suggestive of the varying possible structures of time, as a reflection of a particular culture’s sense of historical progress or the expression of the intangible spirit behind the course of human history, each of the book’s chapters explores a specific theme in the philosophy of time as expressed through music. At once historical, analytical, critical, and ultimately hermeneutic, it provides fresh insight into many familiar nineteenth-century pieces and a rich theoretical basis for future research.

In what ways is music implicated in the politics of belonging? How is the proper at stake in listening? What role does the ear play in forming a sense of community? Music and Belonging argues that ...
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In what ways is music implicated in the politics of belonging? How is the proper at stake in listening? What role does the ear play in forming a sense of community? Music and Belonging argues that music, at the level of style and form, produces certain modes of listening that in turn reveal the conditions of belonging. Specifically, listening shows the intimacy between two senses of belonging: belonging to a community is predicated on the possession of a particular property or capacity. Somewhat counterintuitively perhaps, Waltham-Smith suggests that this relation between belonging-as-membership and belonging-as-ownership manifests itself with particular clarity and rigor at the very heart of the Austro-German canon, in the instrumental music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Music and Belonging provocatively brings recent European philosophy into contact with the renewed music-theoretical interest in Formenlehre, presenting close analyses to show how we might return to this much-discussed repertoire to mine it for fresh insights. The book’s theoretical landscape offers a radical update to Adornian-inspired scholarship, working through debates about relationality, community, and friendship between Derrida, Nancy, Agamben, Badiou, and Malabou. Borrowing the deconstructive strategies of closely reading canonical texts to the point of their unraveling, the book teases out a new politics of listening from processes of repetition and liquidation, from harmonic suppressions, and even from trills. What emerges is the enduring political significance of listening to this music in an era of heightened social exclusion under neoliberalism.Less

Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration

Naomi Waltham-Smith

Published in print: 2017-07-19

In what ways is music implicated in the politics of belonging? How is the proper at stake in listening? What role does the ear play in forming a sense of community? Music and Belonging argues that music, at the level of style and form, produces certain modes of listening that in turn reveal the conditions of belonging. Specifically, listening shows the intimacy between two senses of belonging: belonging to a community is predicated on the possession of a particular property or capacity. Somewhat counterintuitively perhaps, Waltham-Smith suggests that this relation between belonging-as-membership and belonging-as-ownership manifests itself with particular clarity and rigor at the very heart of the Austro-German canon, in the instrumental music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Music and Belonging provocatively brings recent European philosophy into contact with the renewed music-theoretical interest in Formenlehre, presenting close analyses to show how we might return to this much-discussed repertoire to mine it for fresh insights. The book’s theoretical landscape offers a radical update to Adornian-inspired scholarship, working through debates about relationality, community, and friendship between Derrida, Nancy, Agamben, Badiou, and Malabou. Borrowing the deconstructive strategies of closely reading canonical texts to the point of their unraveling, the book teases out a new politics of listening from processes of repetition and liquidation, from harmonic suppressions, and even from trills. What emerges is the enduring political significance of listening to this music in an era of heightened social exclusion under neoliberalism.

From our first social bonding as infants to the funeral rites that mark our passing, music plays an important role in our lives, bringing us closer to one another. This book investigates this role, ...
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From our first social bonding as infants to the funeral rites that mark our passing, music plays an important role in our lives, bringing us closer to one another. This book investigates this role, examining the features of human perception that enable music's uncanny ability to provoke, despite its myriad forms across continents and throughout centuries, the sense of a shared human experience. Drawing on disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, musicology, linguistics, and anthropology, it showcases the ways music is used in rituals, education, work, healing, and as a source of security and—perhaps most importantly—joy. By participating so integrally in such meaningful facets of society, music situates itself as one of the most fundamental bridges between people, a truly cross-cultural form of communication that can create solidarity across political divides.Less

The Music between Us : Is Music a Universal Language?

Kathleen Marie Higgins

Published in print: 2012-06-01

From our first social bonding as infants to the funeral rites that mark our passing, music plays an important role in our lives, bringing us closer to one another. This book investigates this role, examining the features of human perception that enable music's uncanny ability to provoke, despite its myriad forms across continents and throughout centuries, the sense of a shared human experience. Drawing on disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, musicology, linguistics, and anthropology, it showcases the ways music is used in rituals, education, work, healing, and as a source of security and—perhaps most importantly—joy. By participating so integrally in such meaningful facets of society, music situates itself as one of the most fundamental bridges between people, a truly cross-cultural form of communication that can create solidarity across political divides.

Grounded in a research-based, conceptual model called Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK), the essential premise of Music Learning Today:Digital Pedagogy for Creating, Performing, ...
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Grounded in a research-based, conceptual model called Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK), the essential premise of Music Learning Today:Digital Pedagogy for Creating, Performing, and Responding to Music is that music educators and their students can benefit through use of technology as a tool to support learning in the three musical processes – creating, performing, and responding to music. Insights on how technology can be used to advantage in both traditional and emerging learning environments are provided, and research-based pedagogical approaches that align technologies with specific curricular outcomes are described. Importantly, the book advocates that the decision on whether or not to utilize technology for learning, and the specific technology that might be best suited for a particular learning context, should begin with a consideration of curricular outcomes (music subject matter). This is in sharp contrast to most other books on music technology that are technocentric, organized around specific software applications and hardware. The book also recognizes that knowing how to effectively use the technological tools to maximize learning (pedagogy) is a crucial aspect of the teaching-learning process. Drawing on the research and best practice literature in music education and related fields, pedagogical approaches that are aligned with curricular outcomes and specific technologies are suggested. It is not a “how to” book per se, but rather a text informed by the latest research, theories of learning, and documented best practices, with the goal of helping teachers develop the ability to understand the dynamics of effectively using technology for music learning.Less

Music Learning Today : Digital Pedagogy for Creating, Performing, and Responding to Music

William I. Bauer

Published in print: 2014-03-25

Grounded in a research-based, conceptual model called Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK), the essential premise of Music Learning Today:Digital Pedagogy for Creating, Performing, and Responding to Music is that music educators and their students can benefit through use of technology as a tool to support learning in the three musical processes – creating, performing, and responding to music. Insights on how technology can be used to advantage in both traditional and emerging learning environments are provided, and research-based pedagogical approaches that align technologies with specific curricular outcomes are described. Importantly, the book advocates that the decision on whether or not to utilize technology for learning, and the specific technology that might be best suited for a particular learning context, should begin with a consideration of curricular outcomes (music subject matter). This is in sharp contrast to most other books on music technology that are technocentric, organized around specific software applications and hardware. The book also recognizes that knowing how to effectively use the technological tools to maximize learning (pedagogy) is a crucial aspect of the teaching-learning process. Drawing on the research and best practice literature in music education and related fields, pedagogical approaches that are aligned with curricular outcomes and specific technologies are suggested. It is not a “how to” book per se, but rather a text informed by the latest research, theories of learning, and documented best practices, with the goal of helping teachers develop the ability to understand the dynamics of effectively using technology for music learning.